From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Fuels Preventable Disease
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
I tell that story because it is true.
And I wonder... is there a town named Twinkieville in the USA where everyone dies of obesity and/or diabetes and kids can buy pounds of candy at the store without an ID? Or, is every town in America Twinkieville?
Its financialization of everything including food, government tipping the scales against peoples well being and a declining purchasing power of the average american that has resulted in this awful reality where food isn't food.
Well, sort of. That processing is generally there not so much specifically to keep the price down as to prolong the shelf life. But it's true that without the preservatives you'd be paying higher prices.
Perhaps you are referring to a Tastykake from a bygone era?
Have you tried a Tastykake (and a Twinkie)? The difference is obvious if you can spare the calories.
Regarding Twinkie, did you see my other comment on producing them at home using natural ingredients? https://youtu.be/lD2OOTx2G9k?t=592
You may be able to hopefully recreate the original quality using this(if this is something you'd like to try).
Branding is very powerful.
(Never rebrand, it'll just disturb pleasant memories)
I think people sort of miss the forest for the trees with this stuff. Making your own milkshakes, or ice cream, or fried chicken, or Twinkies, will not save you from obesity.
It's not the processing per-se. All these foods are ultra-palatable, readily available, and high in calories/saturated fat.
You will be spending your time but you basically "reverse" the financialization of the product in a way. You could also pay someone to make it for you but then you'd be spending more money (again no free lunch so you have to pick what you want to sacrifice: your time or more money)
I've been trying to do more of this at home to cut out anything processed at home but I have to accept that given limited time I have to let some food items I used to enjoy just go by the wayside.
I've also been trying to do this elsewhere such as "home cooked software" thats tailored to me only and does not include ever increasing junk I dont want.
Doesn't mean they were not yet seriously processed or truly the healthiest to consume.
OTOH there's always vegan Twinkies now:
https://oopsydaisysweets.com/products/vinkies
So attractively priced at only $30.00 a half dozen, they just sold out :(
"That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."
Unhappy Meals - Michael Pollan https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/
Just like: Don't smoke, don't drink, work-out, take walks, spend time with your family and friends, don't work too much. Also, don't worry too much!
All the real problems come in practice.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to have a solid basis.
However, 80% of success comes from applying these things in your messy life.
For example what do I have for breakfast? Oh let's boil and egg amd grab a carrot and corn on the cob. Or whatever.
What do I do in the supermarket? Meats, veg, bit of fruit maybe bit of dairy. Am I obessing over avacado vs. pear. Nope. Chicken vs. beef? No. Chocolate bar vs carrot? easy choice.
Now probably once you get thay square you can do harder stuff like food reaction / allergy testing and so on.
I regularly see folks agonizing about every decision and new study, but the thing is.... the tips on OP's very basic list are responsible for like 80% of the value one gets from "living healthy".
All the rest of the organic whole grain horseshit and panicking about microplastics MIGHT net you another 10%, but at double the cost to your happiness.
The last 10% is basically impossible to achieve without completely sacrificing your quality of life.
Everyone knows that vegetables are good for you basically always.
Superfoods are just the latest marketing fad
And those were before Facebook lol
The latest social media brain rot is that vegetables are bad for you.
Grifters in this space include Paul Saladino and Anthony Chaffee.
Folks on HN are very much in the "Where" stage of life. No one here works 4 out of 8 hours just to pay for their food. Nobody should.
That said, you very much seem to be missing the point. Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods. That is one reason they are more popular.
For example, it would cost me more just to buy the ingredients to make tacos at home than it does to go through a Taco Bell drive through and buy enough for the family already prepared.
We're not going to be moving to four hour workdays by feeding people food that costs twice as much and takes longer to prepare.
They started cooking because feeding the family of 5 at McDonalds cost close to $80.
There may have been a time where fast food was cheaper, but it seems we're past that.
As far as Taco Bell goes, a single crunchy taco is $2.19 and their fancier ones are closer to $5. When I used to eat there I'd usually get 3 tacos and a drink, so I'd be into that today for something like $10-$11. I cook tacos at home regularly for cheaper, and with homemade tortillas and grass fed beef no less.
How much would they eat from McDonald’s? And what size appetite are the kids?
Fast food has definitely gone up in price, but if you’re spending $80 at McDonalds you’re either a glutton or you don’t know what to order.
A “Big Mac Bundle Box” is $15-20 depending on region. It has two Big Macs, two Cheeseburgers, two fries, and a 10-piece nuggets.
If three of the five are kids (vs say 16+ boys lifting weights), I’d be curious how two of those wouldn’t feed the entire family for $30-40.
I’m not suggesting cooking at home is a bad thing nor that eating McD is a good one. But the details matter when you’re spending 2x more than it could be.
I also thought $80 for 5 was high, but that was his anecdotal number. I would have expected $50-60 pretty reasonably, and still st that point a family of 5 could eat for a good bit cheaper at home.
I'm sure it varies by region, but my grubhub app and the 12 pack of tacos (hard or soft) is $24.99 here so about the same as the $2.19 you found.
I had perplexity pro figure out the cost of purchasing the ingredients for comparable homemade tacos. With great value (Walmart store brand) ingredients it came to $20.04. $6.49 of that would be "left over" ingredients you don't use (mostly half a pound of beef you could use for something else later).
So you save $0.96 cents per taco by doing all the work yourself and using generic ingredients. Plus you get an extra half pound of beef for later.
So if your time is worth less than $12/hr it's a net gain.
I'm assuming it takes you only half an hour to travel, shop, and bring home the ingredients then half an hour to cook. If you live further away, factor in gas etc, the time it takes to do dishes, or are a slower cook then the break-even might come out closer to $6-$7/hr.
Tortillas themselves use very little, a cup of flour and a couple tablespoons of butter so maybe $1-$2? The beef we use is around $12/lb and we use 1/2lb to feed two of us. I don't have a cost on the seasoning, we mix it fresh as well so its negligible.
I'd assume we end up around $10 to feed two adults and spend around 45 minutes on the high end. We'd spend about that long to get to taco bell, though we live in a more rural area so that may be an over estimate for most.
I think this is mostly true in the US and a cultural thing.
In EU and SA for example I can buy “whole” food - just called food here - for a fraction of the price it would cost me to buy a bunch of cheeseburgers or some other junk food every day.
Is it? What is the cost of bag of rice? Potatoes? lentils?
Vegetarian India literally suffers from one of the highest rates of protein deficiency and stunted growth worldwide.
Seitan, tofu, tempeh, TVP, etc etc. All plant based, all high protein.
I don’t know if we need as much animal foodstuff as we consume but just doing that should be enough.
Under that usage, the fact that the rule doesn’t provide fine-grained advice doesn’t disqualify it from being a heuristic. Eating mostly plants is a rule used in decision making when considering what to eat.
> The extreme is that it is advising people to seek treatment if they suffer from pica or bulimia.
How is that entailed?
It's the bare minimum if you care about aging well, maximally healthy is a whole other thing
But I am biased. I‘ve seen this slogan everywhere to promote UPFs that claim to be healthy because they are „vegan“.
Now that the market for meat alternatives has collapsed I don’t see this reasoning anymore. What a strange coincidence.
What country are you reporting from? It seems to be absolutely booming in the UK. A brief internet search suggests it's growing and predicted to boom in the US as well.
It's extremely high in saturated fat and lots of meat is carcinogenic. We classify bacon in the same category of carcinogen as alcohol and tobacco. Meaning, we know, for sure, it causes cancer.
Unfortunately trends towards plant-based food seem to have taken a step backwards in recent years and I suspect the current moral panic around UPFs hasn’t helped. But the evidence on UPFs as harmful is pretty tenuous at the moment, while the evidence on meat and adverse health effects is considerably more comprehensive.
Me neither, I prefer common knowledge that has stood the test of time for a lot longer, like about 100 years more.
Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote actually.
Sometimes we don't need cold baths or extreme regimens to fix all the messed up things we're doing to our bodies. Simple changes go far to heal the damage.
Most people fighting addiction and having a hard time is fighting a chemical dependency, which is a lot harder and when people start looking beyond "Just do X instead".
From the article:
> Basic science models show that liquid sugar concentrations around 10% by weight—comparable with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew—can reliably trigger addictive behaviors in animals, including bingelike consumption, withdrawal, and dopamine system alterations.
But yeah, it's obviously nothing close to a nicotine.
Are churches a predatory business? If the answer is no, then why are sugar manufacturers? If the answer is tradition etc., then that basically proves my point.
the institution that invented Tithes? The institution that if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people? Which will take old women aside and talk about getting into heaven and helping missions in poor countries full of poor little children?
That institution might have a predatory business model?
The threat of hell is certainly very uncoercive yeah
> if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people
So basically you're paying for a service? Your argument would be much better if they didn't actually help people with important stuff.
That is the kind of situation the funeral thing was highlighting, not the provision of a service, but the creation of a coercive incentive for social hierarchy and emotional support around a very difficult moment.
Its the same reason predatory loans are predatory, not because loans are bad but because you find people at their lowest and provide a service where they are incentivised to make reckless financial choices
Similar to shark loans, creating alternatives will always come with compromises. either we have public lenders that will lend money that will never be returned, or we leave a strata of society without access to capital.
But diagnosing the predatory nature of shark loans does not mean the proposal of an alternative.
I think the church model is coercive, specially when threats are existencial. Hell is beyond any threat you could make to someone who believes in it. Does not mean that I can come up witha. universal, generalisable model for providing adequate funeral rites, emotional support and remove social status from society.
THe big challenge is separating the good from the bad commercial interests. It's not a challenge because differentiating the good from the harmful is difficult, but because bad actor industries also make A LOT of money that buys a lot of political power and also employ a lot of people, so removing them from economy would have negative economic and political consequences.
Basically it's like a dead man's switch in a mutually assured destruction weapon.
Killing the tobacco industry for example would have incredibly positive economic consequences, despite the job loss.
Yeah but both tobacco industry employees and smokers vote. If they make up a large enough voter base, then this is political suicide in any democracy.
Hence how it took until 2019 to ban indoor smoking in my EU country, even though it was known for a long time it's a public health issue.
Algorithm, food, intoxicants, anything that has manipulative potential.
Except banning heroin clearly didn't work so well! There's still a lot of people using it. And the profits from selling it go to criminal gangs. And the people using it often die due to inconsistent dosing.
How do you define "manipulative potential"? If you ban sugar in drinks, do you ban fruit juice too? Where do we draw the line for "acceptable harm"? Personally I don't want to live in a society which bans huge numbers of things.
I’m not sure why we’d consider oils, emulsifiers or fortification and indicator of poor health outcomes.
Whole grain cereals are associated with positive health outcomes so I’m not sure why something being a liquid cereal would be a negative.
FWIW I would agree that oat milk is probably an inferior milk to dairy in most aspects except fibre content, but that’s not because of the reasons you gave. And soy milk seems either equal or superior to dairy milk in all outcomes that I’ve seen.
By whom? Oils are not necessarily bad for you.
And the low fat milk in the carton is pretty far from natural, where oat milk in example seems to be pretty simple process based on quick googling:
https://www.loveandlemons.com/oat-milk/
Of course any industry can make anything ultra processed, like oat milk, but the generalization was wee bit hefty here.
According to Wikipedia, organic food does not offer any advantage over ordinary food.
There was a time when alcohol dealing led to an awful lot of that sort of violence. We put a stop to it when we legalized Alcohol and regulated it.
Our bodies interact with extremely large amounts of elements in the environment and behavior that act beyond our conscious comprehension.
Sometimes in our favour and some others against us.
Banning everything that at some point worked against us is just establishing human life full of total deprivation. Worse than living in jail. Good luck maintaining a society in those conditions.
The individual and the society should instead focus on educating and teaching how to navigate an environment full of those elements.
There is a strong correlation between someone making money and someone arguing that people being able to make money is about freedom.
And here we are a few centuries into capitalism and people say that they are conflicted because personal freedom = making money off people. Effectively.
Yet there are many freedoms that are not profitable. We just have to sit down in a chair and think it through for ten minutes. Preferably without the corrupting influence of a scren.
The power asymmetry behind and in the front of the six inch screen is immense.
It wasn't too much like an academic publication, there were plenty of those, but lots of times a breakthrough would be reported anyway, and everything was more commercially oriented by far.
You know how trade publications can be kind of uninteresting for non-insiders, IR could be so boring that college professors wouldn't even read it.
But you could tell when an author had recently left academia and joined industry though because their papers appeared more academic than very seasoned ones.
It's still a challenging transition to make, but I'll never forget how it was addressed one time in the back pages. Where you get the occasional cartoon comic like you would in consumer media.
There's two scientists in lab coats working at their benches, the boss comes on the intercom and they look at each other as he blasts from the overhead speaker:
"Hey you guys in Research, get off your butts and invent something that's habit forming".
Which technically isn't hard because criminal enterprise is pretty damn inefficient!
We litearlly can't ban everything that is bad in the large. That would simply be to many things.
Cigarettes were already regulated.
More like banning was applied to advertising and indoor smoking in lots of places.
>without doing a full baning.
This is why it worked, as good as it did.
That was enough regulation of the prominent, growing hazard & risk, for the vast majority to experience how much better it was than before, and usage snowballed downward as much as it could.
Without fully prohibiting anybody.
Advertising has huge persuasive ability.
A list of sugar alcohols including their classification numbers in Europe is:
Sorbitol (E 420)
Mannitol (E 421)
Isomalt (E 954)
Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)
Lactitol (E 966)
Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)
Xylitol (E 967)
Erythritol (E 967)
Seems to me that it would require quite a lot of sweets, frequently.
Hence why they are excluded in a low-FODMAP diet (the P stands for polyols).
Keeping a healthy diet while avoiding them is extremely difficult, so if they are not causing irritation, avoiding them will likely do more harm than good. Excessive amounts, or a sudden increase in intake, can cause issues for anyone, so changes in diet, especially from an unhealthy diet to one high in fresh fruits and vegetables, may be best done gradually.
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There was a "Nature of Things" episode on this titled, "Foodspiracy". The reason why UPF's have been designed and marketed with many of the same strategies as tobacco is because several big tobacco companies diversified into food. They literally transferred their expertise from marketing cigarettes to marketing junk food.
Companies like Joe Camel started out using cute/cool animal mascots to condition kids so they'd buy Joe Camel cigarettes when they were old enough to smoke (if not sooner). There was a lot of competition for adult smokers, so hooking kids on their brand before any other company got to them was a winning strategy. When they pivoted into UPF's, they immediately put animal mascots and cartoon characters on cereal boxes. They no longer had to wait for their target audience to grow up a bit.
It's sobering to find out that companies specializing in unhealthy addiction have literally gone from cigarettes to potato chips and breakfast cereals without missing a step, and kids are their preferred demographic.
Even American Spirit's website denies that "organic" or natural tobacco is any safer.
1. https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/products-ingredients-co...
As far as I can tell, that page never actually tries to answer "Are "all-natural" cigarettes less harmful than ones with additives?".
Neither are healthy for you, yes, we get that, but the question is if one is slightly less unhealthy?
This is the settlement that Natural American Spirit had to agree to because they couldn't provide evidence that additive-free cigarettes are any safer:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2000/04/...
These are not the same thing
It's likely safer but not meaningfully enough to make much difference, as it's still obviously very bad for you
There's no evidence that it's safer at all. Reynolds lost a big lawsuit over its American Spirit brand implying that their cigarettes are safer. If they could have provided evidence to the contrary, they would have.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2000/04/...
The thousands of "chemicals" from cigarettes are not put in there. They come from combustion. Setting shit on fire makes chemicals turn into other chemicals, some of them very harmful. That's why many survivors of 9/11 later died from lung cancer.
> In pure form, nicotine is a colorless to yellowish, oily liquid that readily penetrates biological membranes and acts as a potent neurotoxin in insects, where it serves as a antiherbivore toxin.
> The overwhelming majority of independent research shows that filters do not reduce the harms associated with smoking - a fact understood by tobacco industry scientists in the 1960s. In fact, filters may increase the harms caused by smoking by enabling smokers to inhale smoke more deeply into their lungs.
Also, plain common sense will tell you that inhaling toxic smoke through a small piece of paper is not much healthier than inhaling toxic smoke directly.
I'm not sure NSS are necessarily "healthwashing" - they are genuinely a healthier alternative, at least in SSBs. Pointing to some very speculative research about "gut microbiome disruption" as if that somehow means NSS are something we should be concerned about in our diet doesn't seem to reflect the body of evidence on the subject. On balance they seem to be either a neutral or beneficial product, depending on what they replace in the diet.
I think one important distinction between UPF and cigarettes is that we have lots of examples of healthy UPFs. Are there any such examples for cigarettes? Even those researchers who voice concerns about the health impacts of UPFs (Kevin Hall, Samuel Dicken) seem to be largely interested in identifying _which_ UPFs might drive poor health outcomes and why, so we can regulate industry to make their products more health promoting.
My concern with this analogy between cigarettes and UPFs is that we end up with a movement to completely ban UPFs when they have lots of useful properties (can be stored at ambient temperature, long shelf life, reliable quality) that make them very important for people with limited means. The dream scenario, IMO, is that we regulate out the worst of the harmful properties, rather than trying to get rid of them entirely (which I think is the dream scenario with cigarettes).
Isn't that basically vapes? A nicotine delivery mechanism without the most harmful properties, created by regulation on tobacco.
The thing with tobacco is it doesn't really have any benefit. It isn't a social lubricant like alcohol and doesn't have medical use like opiates. Old World societies managed fine before tobacco.
It is, and I'm not a smoker. Ironically mainly because of the indoor smoking bans.
You can stop this addiction right now by merely doing nothing and not eating "UPFs". You have the power. When you get stressed and want to burn time and energy eating because it's at least eating, how about doing a different thing? Each one of us is powered by a soul that can defy these behavior loops with some self-reflection.
(For the record my only vice is coffee.)
Forget McDonalds, almost any Italian or Thai restaurant to me is like a drug dealer.
There is no amount of chicken alfredo that is satisfying to me. It doesn't matter how it is made, the poison is in the dosage and I am going to eat way too much.
I hope you enjoy spending all of your mental energy self-reflecting to kick the addiction.
And in many places UPFs are cheaper and more widely available than unprocessed food. If you're worried about paying rent, you're not questioning cheap calories for your family.
Even if we can agree that people should exercise more willpower, isn't there something wrong with companies weaponizing science to make food as addictive as possible?
By country the largest consumers of UPFs are also on average the longest lived. They are a by-product of wealth, as is obesity, what people are trying to pin on UPFs is much more likely to be a symptom of excess.
If you trace all countries by causes and incidences of death or morbidity there is nothing unusual or unexpected in the countries that consume the most UPFs, in some cases they even have lower figures.
Unprocessed food is usually a sign of quality, that is all.
Eat less. Lift more. Run more.
Being downvoted for stating the facts is very common on HN.